72 Hours
by IVIaedhros
Summary: They say that the greatest danger in trying to save someone from drowning, is the victim...rated for violence, mild cursing


_And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him__ who can destroy both soul and body in hell._

_Matthew 10:28_

When it began, it was November, the sky a dirty grey fading to black. It started shortly before dinner time. Her father was off at his weekly house calls. It was when Karin was in the living room watching Don Kanonji, and she was making shrimp wasabi rolls that the electricity flickered and died.

"Karin, that's five yen!" Yuzu yelled reprovingly as her twin finished biting off the last of a long list of expletives.

Grumbling under her breath, Karin stomped over from the living room and into the kitchen before she reached into the right pocket of her worn jean shorts and pulled out eight yen pieces, which she promptly flung on to the white counter.

Pouting at the egg-drop soup that would go unheated, Yuzu took each of the pieces and began inserting them in her own pocket. "Karin," Yuzu said, "you gave me eight." She looked up at her sister in inquiry. Karin shrugged. "That's for later." Then she walked out of the kitchen. There was a quick, staccato pounding as Karin stomped her way up the stairs and slammed the door to her room.

Yuzu shook her head. Her deal with Karin about cursing wasn't helping like she had hoped.

Realizing the power wasn't likely to come back, Yuzu plastic wrapped the unfinished soup and place it in the refrigerator for later use. Her lips pursed in annoyance as she searched through the refrigerator for an alternative main dish: if the power didn't come back on soon, the food would go bad. Eventually, she settled on some mackerel. It looked like it was going to be a sushi night. It was rather plain, but she'd garnish it with the leftover wasabi and some lemon.

Setting aside the finish rolls, Yuzu began methodically preparing the cold fish, losing herself as she often did in the rhythmic _tacks_ of her knife striking the cutting board and in the nameless melody she hummed.

Off in the distance, she could hear dogs barking.

_Tack_

Down the middle, we fiddle.

_Tack_

Down the sides we slide.

Yuzu shivered, hugging her sides. Padding over to wall near the poster of her mother and looked at the thermometer. It was set properly.

The sound of furniture toppling, a loud crash: Yuzu jumped upwards a few inches in fright before she worriedly made her way to the stairwell.

"Karin, what are you doing? Karin, are you alright?"

More crashing, sounds of wood scraping against wood as if someone were to take the end of a mop handle and scrape it over the length of rough plywood. Yuzu quickly ascended the stairs, worried about her sister and none too curious about her sister was doing to cause such a noise.

"Karin!" she called, reaching for the door knob, "Karin, I'm coming in! Karin, what're you…" her hands dropped numbly to her side. Her sister hovered in the air in martyr's pose, crucified by unseen hands, her back arched at an extreme angle from agony, her face in silent rictus of torment. Around the young martyr was the set wreckage of her room: furniture scattered all about and broken at odd angles, sheets and posters rent with long gashes from unseen claws and a bitter stench.

"Ahh..AhHhHhHhHh..!" Yuzu's inarticulate lament sounded more of a moan of agony than a terrified wail. She stood paralyzed, unable to move, struck dumb by the blasphemous horror that had invaded their peaceful lives.

The windows shattered in a sharp hail and the furniture flew into a whipping cyclone as if blown by a demonic wind. Gibbering voices tittered madness in Yuzu's ear as she pinned against the wall by unseen hands whose nails bit into her skin and whose breath reeked of decay.

"BASTARDS!"

Her father's cane clove through seemingly empty air, but still struck true: a thin wail sounded at the edge of Yuzu's hearing as her father dashed around the room, his eyes flashing with a berserker's mad rage. His cane glowed faintly while he spun it through wild gyrations around the room. Karin abruptly dropped from the air to land on the wooden floor with a dull thud.

"Run! RUN!" Her father knelt by Karin's side, blood from his forehead obscuring his gaze. She stood paralyzed still. "RUN, DAMN YOU!" Her father cursing at her when he'd never, in the whole lives of the twins, spoken coarsely in front of them, shocked Yuzu out of her stasis, causing her to pop up and sprint out like a runner who's heard the pistol shot.

"Go to the Shrine of Green Waters and wait for Makizou!" he called out to Yuzu as she almost fell down the stairs in her haste. Yuzu was out of the house in seconds, gasping for breath and crying uncontrollably. She'd made it almost a block from her home when there was an unholy roar and a great explosion. Yuzu turned back and watched in horror as, one by one, starting with her own home, the houses along the street erupted into splinters, torn apart by hands of giants. In the sky, she now saw the faint, black outlines of pale faced titans.

She did not break down. She did not panic or scream in grief: the shock was too much to comprehend, the thought that her family could just be _gone_, inconsiderable.

"_Kurosaki!" _

A faint, thin voice shouted at her as if from far away. Yuzu dumbly turned to look at the source and saw down the road another black shape, this one a man with white gleaming eyes, running at her with a gait that was oddly impaired with what seemed to be injury. Her trance was broken when a fiery line of pain lanced over her back. Gasping, Yuzu turned her gaze upward. Descending on her in transparent mass of shadows, the vague forms of misshapen crows came down screeching.

Yuzu took off sprinting again, terror lending her feet speed she'd never had before in life as the least athletic Kurosaki. Dull light flashed in the periphery and Yuzu lurched to the side in time to not be decapitated by the man-shadow's opaque blade. The man-shadow could have still gotten her: the feint caused her to tumble to ground at the shadow's feet. The crippled shade seemed to grow darker, more solid as it raised its weapon to finish the task, but before the blade could kill her, the malformed crows returned and swarmed the two of them. Distant curses and the caw-cawing of birds could be heard by Yuzu's spiritually dull ears as she again ran away. Pain, dulled to the point of being almost unnoticeable by her overwhelming terror, blossomed on her hand. She ran and she ran and, as she ran, her feet took her by blind instinct's guide to the Shrine of Green Waters while it seemed someone had taken her hand dipped it into boiling grease.

The shrine was a big, red, wooden building in the shape of a traditional pagoda, lit by paraffin lamps, trimmed in white and gold. Yuzu made it inside in time to collapse in a trembling heap by the altar. Her breath came in great, racking gasps. As she lay sprawled out before the altar, she began to pray. What she prayed, she didn't know, but she thought of her big, loud father and her orange haired brother and how she never got to give her sister back that extra three yen.

Hazily, Yuzu glanced down to see why her left hand was hurting so much.

Her left hand was gone; taken, three inches above the wrist.

As Yuzu gazed at the space where her missing hand should have been and the pool of bright red blood that was steadily growing in spread, she wondered why this occurrence did not bother her more. Yuzu's hearing deadened as the sound of her own heart beat grew louder in her ears. Blackness crept into her vision, first as a few specks of black, then as swarm before finishing as a descending curtain. Yuzu felt a jolt move through her body then a great _ripping _and then…

"Is that me…?" As Yuzu kneeled down beside her own corpse, she could not help, but be fascinated. It seemed to Yuzu that she was looking at the perfect doll of herself, except that she had two working hands and this doll's maker had mistakenly taken the doll's left from her. The cut was very clean; made is if by a blade. And there was the chain: a long, solid white chain connecting this wonderful, horrifying doll to her.

"Kuro…saki."

Yuzu looked up and at last beheld the man-shade made real, standing at the entrance of the shrine. Where before had only been a transparently black silhouette there now stood an older man with a much lined face and black hair that was slicked back and cropped short to the neck. This shade made real was clean shaven save for two small bits of hair at either end of his upper lip. His black robes were torn and damp in several places and down his right arm, dark blood trickled and ran down a drawn katana, mingling with the bright rose liquid that dripped and pooled along the edge of his blade.

An immense roar suddenly split the air, causing Yuzu to clamp her ears and the man to whirl around in horror. Her vision of the outside appeared to waver like the air near pavement on a hot summer's day. Crimson light flooded the room and the man dove to the side, cursing, as a blast of white hot electricity leapt from his arm. Heat washed over her as the entrance disappeared in an explosion and the rumble of falling stones while Yuzu cowered in the corner near the shrine and the doll. When she at last removed her hands from over her eyes, Yuzu gasped. Her pursuer was pinned under the rubble of the shrine's entrance, its blessed stones allowing him no escape as they had crushed his legs and pelvis under their fearful weight and leaving him to gaze up at her from his below. To his side was the shard of the lower portion of blade. The upper fragment had flown off and now lay on the floor between herself and the trapped spirit.

The two looked at one another, caught in that terrible moment: one in surprise, the other in horror. The man started coughing convulsively, blood spattering the ground like saliva. When he looked up at her again, his squinty eyes shone with madness and a determination that lasts beyond the grave. Stretching out his left hand like a bloodied claw, he grit his bloodied teeth and began to chant in a slurred voice that spoke of his death's impending approach. In response to his chants her chain convulsed, the snake to the charmer's flute, and began to crawl towards the dying man and his awaiting blade. Yuzu screamed and dove back on her belly, clawing at the ground, uncaring as her fingernails were ripped from their beds.

The chanting grew softer, but more forceful: the final wind given to the dying aiding his dreadful spell.

She kicked and she screamed, screamed for her father, for her dead mother.

The chain reached the man's outstretched hands and he added his own strength to the weakening quickly dying spell, pulling the chain with both hands while the hilt and its shard sat ready and waiting.

"K…K-Kon…Konso…"

Eight feet…

Six…

Five…

Three and he reached out, claw like hand snatching at the end of her shoe and finding a purchase enough to tug her back. This he did, pulling her until her hips were level with his own head and his left arm crushed her torso in an iron grip as it snaked around her, tighter and more secure in his mortal desperation than any python could be.

The broken hilt was held inches above her forehead and a blood-garbled prayer for safe passage of the innocent spoken on broken red lips.

There was a sickening squelch and blood rushed out in a miniature tide of dark crimson to bathe Yuzu and the man in a terrible intimacy. Screams filled the room: the man's and Yuzu's intertwining; a delirious cacophony of horror and the rage against death and for life's survival.

Yuzu pushed the upper blade fragment deeper into the man's eye, unfeeling as it sliced the tendons that held her fingers to her hand. The blade went up, up, and disappeared into the man's head. At last, the man ceased his struggle as suddenly as toy soldier will stop moving if you flick a switch. Yuzu followed him into oblivion, going limp in his embrace like a ragged doll. Her respite in oblivion was only temporary, however. As she awoke in the embrace of a dead man whom she had killed, his one remaining eye staring at her in madness and terror, something within Yuzu broke.

Giggling like a loon, she jumped up as if she'd been shocked. Snatching the very hilt and its broken fragment that had been meant for her, Yuzu began cutting at her enemy's corpse with quick, bloody flourishes.

Down the middle we fiddle

_Slash, slash_

Down the sides we slide

_Slash, slash, slash_

When her wrists became too tired, moving as she'd seen men do when they chop wood with great, big axes. When her arms became tired, she sawed, cutting and cutting. In time, Yuzu could move no more and the man's body was human no more, rather, it could only be described as the macabre refuse of a butcher. Her bloody catharsis completed, Yuzu collapsed to her knees, soaking in the hot life of this life she had ended to save her own, and she began to sob quietly. Yuzu did not know how long she did, but eventually it seemed to her that she noticed the corpse again and was horrified and repelled by it. She began to run away, seeking to go further into the temple, but she was still bound to the doll by the chain. Desperate and panicking, she quickly took up the broken sword for one last time and while she held it against the floor with her left, she cut at it with her right.

The chain instantly gave way.

Dashing away as fast as her tired legs would take her, Yuzu scaled a nearby ladder as fast as she could go, then the next one, then the next one. When she could ascend no higher within the temple, she pulled up the ladder and waited in the corner furthest from the window. Yuzu hugged her knees to her chest and waited.

"Everything's going to fine…going to be fine…" she whispered to herself.

And as she sat, the chain became shorter.

**End**

_A/N: Happy belated Halloween. It's not what I originally had in mind for my first horror fic', but I think it's a passable first attempt. This was one of those annoying fics that strike you right before you have to go to bed and you just know that you're either going to finish _all _of it and lose out on sleep or you're going to go to bed and forget what made the stupid plot bunny interesting in the first place. Obviously, I chose the first option._

_I blame this fic' on too much H.P. Lovecraft (may Yog-Sothoth bless his brilliant, deranged soul) and on a burning, directionless hatred of the Bleach fandom. I foolishly checked in on the latest stories only to be again assaulted by Hitsugaya/Momo garbage, three lesbo romances and one vampire fic'. AND HALF THE TARDS COULDN'T GET THE SPELLING RIGHT IN THEIR FREAKIN' SUMMARY!!!...sorry, but I'm always nice when I give criticism, so I have to vent somewhere. _

_If you're confused who "man-shade" was, it was Makizou Aramaki, the tenth seat of the 11__th__ Division, AKA "Maki-Maki" and Yachiru's occasional babysitter. _


End file.
